RAID Array Slow For No Reason

[Husky]

Hello,

 

I have an old S3420GP Intel Sever Board in an Intel Chassis, and it has built in RAID on the motherboard. I know that this type of RAID is never really that good, but I am having huge speed issues with it.

 

There are 2 options for RAID in the BIOS - Intel ESRT2 (powered by LSI) and Intel Matrix. I have tried with both and the ESRT2 seems to be slightly faster. There are 6 500 GB Seagate Enterprise drives in a RAID 10 Array.

 

When the server is under high disk I/O load, the HDD activity light is solidly lit and the disk usage is at 100%, but if you listen to the drives, they are not really doing much and are very quiet. But if I turn the RAID controller off and set the disks to straight AHCI and install Linux using MDADM, then when it starts up or when it loads stuff, you can hear all of the disks crunching really loudly in a beautiful grinding symphony like they are supposed to and the server is noticeably faster and more responsive.

 

Is there a solution to this? I need to use a RAID controller because this server is going to end up running Windows Server and that doesn't have something similar to MDADM. I have dabbled with Storage Spaces and Disk Management RAID before but it worked absolutely terribly.

[LukeSavenije]

with anything above 4 drives I highly recommend a raid card. For mobo's it's pretty hard to handle

[Master Disaster]

7 minutes ago, Husky said:

Hello,

 

I have an old S3420GP Intel Sever Board in an Intel Chassis, and it has built in RAID on the motherboard. I know that this type of RAID is never really that good, but I am having huge speed issues with it.

 

There are 2 options for RAID in the BIOS - Intel ESRT2 (powered by LSI) and Intel Matrix. I have tried with both and the ESRT2 seems to be slightly faster. There are 6 500 GB Seagate Enterprise drives in a RAID 10 Array.

 

When the server is under high disk I/O load, the HDD activity light is solidly lit and the disk usage is at 100%, but if you listen to the drives, they are not really doing much and are very quiet. But if I turn the RAID controller off and set the disks to straight AHCI and install Linux using MDADM, then when it starts up or when it loads stuff, you can hear all of the disks crunching really loudly in a beautiful grinding symphony like they are supposed to and the server is noticeably faster and more responsive.

 

Is there a solution to this? I need to use a RAID controller because this server is going to end up running Windows Server and that doesn't have something similar to MDADM. I have dabbled with Storage Spaces and Disk Management RAID before but it worked absolutely terribly.

Storage spaces wouldn't work for booting from the array anyway, afaik there's no software raid solution that allows booting (for pretty obvious reasons).

 

As suggested above, get yourself a raid card.

[Falconevo]

2 hours ago, Husky said:

Hello,

 

I have an old S3420GP Intel Sever Board in an Intel Chassis, and it has built in RAID on the motherboard. I know that this type of RAID is never really that good, but I am having huge speed issues with it.

 

There are 2 options for RAID in the BIOS - Intel ESRT2 (powered by LSI) and Intel Matrix. I have tried with both and the ESRT2 seems to be slightly faster. There are 6 500 GB Seagate Enterprise drives in a RAID 10 Array.

  

When the server is under high disk I/O load, the HDD activity light is solidly lit and the disk usage is at 100%, but if you listen to the drives, they are not really doing much and are very quiet. But if I turn the RAID controller off and set the disks to straight AHCI and install Linux using MDADM, then when it starts up or when it loads stuff, you can hear all of the disks crunching really loudly in a beautiful grinding symphony like they are supposed to and the server is noticeably faster and more responsive.

  

Is there a solution to this? I need to use a RAID controller because this server is going to end up running Windows Server and that doesn't have something similar to MDADM. I have dabbled with Storage Spaces and Disk Management RAID before but it worked absolutely terribly.

Configuring RAID generally turns off the disk cache on the SATA drive, look in the configuration of the RAID controller to see if you can re-enable it.  It comes with a warning as you will potentially have data loss in the event the machine loses power during a write operation.

[Mikensan]

When you say high I/O are you directly referring to IOPS? Because you technically only have the combined IOPS of 3 of those enterprise disks which is still below 1,000 IOPS. Compared to a SSD which on the low end is 40,000, is a pretty big gap.

 

 

Have you tried using a benchmark software like Crystal Disk Mark or HDtune?

 

It's not like you're using parity anyway, so there's no computation happening. I doubt a new controller would make any difference.

[Husky]

52 minutes ago, Falconevo said:

Configuring RAID generally turns off the disk cache on the SATA drive, look in the configuration of the RAID controller to see if you can re-enable it.  It comes with a warning as you will potentially have data loss in the event the machine loses power during a write operation.

I have checked the settings and the cache is set to enabled.

[Husky]

17 minutes ago, Mikensan said:

When you say high I/O are you directly referring to IOPS? Because you technically only have the combined IOPS of 3 of those enterprise disks which is still below 1,000 IOPS. Compared to a SSD which on the low end is 40,000, is a pretty big gap.

 

 

Have you tried using a benchmark software like Crystal Disk Mark or HDtune?

 

It's not like you're using parity anyway, so there's no computation happening. I doubt a new controller would make any difference.

No, I am referring to the "Demand" on the disks. The disks are not even trying when I use the built-in RAID controller. But when I use software RAID then the disks run a lot faster and you can actually hear them crunching and working hard as expected. But on the RAID controller, it's like the disks are on holiday even when Windows says the disk usage is 100% or when I run a CrystalDiskMark, then sound very quiet and don't do much, and the performance is terrible as a result.

[leadeater]

15 hours ago, Husky said:

I have checked the settings and the cache is set to enabled.

There's two cache settings, controller cache and disk cache. Which one is enabled? Either way your best bet is to get a proper RAID card like an LSI 9260 or 9361 with CacheVault module. You can make Storage Spaces run really well, I use it for my array of SSDs and HDDs, but it requires a lot of tuning + PowerShell Magic + SSDs for either Tiering or Journal (write-back cache) to get good performance out of it. It's mainly designed for servers with much higher end hardware configurations, small setups tend to do very poorly.

[Husky]

5 hours ago, leadeater said:

There's two cache settings, controller cache and disk cache. Which one is enabled? Either way your best bet is to get a proper RAID card like an LSI 9260 or 9361 with CacheVault module. You can make Storage Spaces run really well, I use it for my array of SSDs and HDDs, but it requires a lot of tuning + PowerShell Magic + SSDs for either Tiering or Journal (write-back cache) to get good performance out of it. It's mainly designed for servers with much higher end hardware configurations, small setups tend to do very poorly.

It just says "Read Cache" and "Write Cache" and they are both on. There are no other cache options.

 

You are right, I need to get a real RAID controller.

 

Thanks for your help.